ATTENTION! Help guide our future in our new Gameplay Survey!

[Weyird]

So Paradox wants to build a city builder (lol, weird phrase), but want to see what setting people want. Okay, sounds cool.

I mean, I love Cities Skylines. But that's the modern / Slightly Futuristic setting filled. I haven't played Surviving Mars because it doesn't look fun, but that's the somewhat further future filled... in a weird way. I think that there is a Fallout base-building game that is either out or coming out sometime? Between that and Frostpunk I think the post-apocalyptic thing has been done. I usually love fantasy settings, but for some reason I think I'd hate a city builder in that setting. Could be wrong though. It would need a really interesting Lore / setting. Actually, I think I might be coming around to the idea. It'd have to be very original though, not too stereotypical. I played the shit out of Caesar 3 when I was younger. I loved that. I loved struggling to get to the level objectives and get to the next level. That's a completely different type of thing from Cities Skylines which is a purely creative endeavor. I don't want Cities Skylines to be challenging, I want to use it as a creative outlet. That's why I play it with unlimited money and a bunch of mods. But a difficult / challenging game like Banished? I tried that; it was lots of fun. But it just got boring quick after the first few challenges. 'Challenging' would work with a Ceasar 3 type game where it's more like levels you have to complete. In a level-based challenging game, each level can throw different arrangements of threats at you and that's what would make it memorable. It's less of a sandbox type thing though, which is what Paradox Studios usually love to go for.

 

[C.N.]

So, that's why Jake has been playing Caesar 3 a lot.
More seriously, I think it's more a question about CO or Haemimont looking for what to develop next.

 

[Orinsul]

This is why it needed a question about what type of city builder.
I really hope it's a skylines style simulation/immersion one they have in mind.
Not a gamey puzzle/boardgame style or anything like the impression games that are all puzzle no city.

Also you don't need combat to be fantasy. Guilds and dealing with common, church and feudal land and stuff would be more city builder. Fantasy/medieval politics and urban development rather than soldiers.
Abstracted off map stuff and dealing with how the city runs when the levies are raised and marched off maybe.

HERES MY IDEA FOR A FANTASY CITIES GAME

I've been imagining a D&D style setting where you're building a city ala Skylines on basically skylines mechanics, underneath it is a dungeon, ruins, etc represented by a cool entrance building in the starting tile, that you can clear out/open up when you reach X population by paying X money or something, or having X guardhouses and paying X money, you get the point, and everytime you clear out a level it unlocks the next level of buildings the way Skylines has population milestones. Raises the demand for scavenging and loot-selling businesses to set up in the city and attracts more adventures (skyline's tourists) to the city who'll come to explore the new level and spend their money in the city when they do.

I'd want mixed zoning though, and mixed buildings. maybe instead of zoning allocating districts (drawn the skylines way) to organisations, this one to the church of such and such, this one to the merchants, this one to the production guilds, this to the cleric guilds. And then unique guild house and themed shop buildings to them would pop up alongside the inns, residential slums and tightly packed housing and everywhere in the city stuff. Maybe alleys and passages develop themselves in zone squares if your planned roads make people go out of their way to be both a hassle to you and bring a slightly more organic look to the city, makeshift dirt ones that you can upgrade to proper roads if you want to.

Maybe you can promote a thieves guild and attract those elements who'd build a different buildings and bring in more money to your treasury but lower the wealth of your citizens and maybe scare off traders, or side with the dark cult who'd help maintain law and order and lead to neat black and gothic looking buildings popping up but treat non believers poorly, give a riverside district to merchants and it'll pop up in docks and market squares or to the church and it'll be plazas, noble villas and temples, or just, have fantasy factions and by allocation districts to them they'd influence its growth and if powerful enough the city as a whole?
Also demographics, elfs don't die as quickly but they buy less, you can fit more halflings in a low wealth residential building but some sort of negative to represent they eat more food or something? Orcs are good workers but non orcs dont like living near them. Or better ideas than those ones.
One of the natural disasters could be a dragon, another an evil curse.

So it's still basically cities skylines but instead of building a eurotastic future utopia you're building a waterdeep or amn or ankh-morpork, But the same basic Cities Skylines mechanics and gameplay under it. Cities: Dungeons or Cities: Fantasy or something.
That's what I'd like to see.
If CO made a game like that I would 100% buy it.

Also consider Cities Skylines but its victorian-edwardian, cars exist but arent common so road design is all different, all those wacky steampunky mass transportation ideas, pollution is a bigger deal.

 

[fr-rein]

Ah... no Victoria 2...
This said, I would love some great steampunk city-builder.

 

[Mr. Capiatlist]

Gotta put my name behind a fantasy city builder. Build inns to lure in unsuspecting D&D parties and then feed them to the coven of Vampires that lives in the castle that was built as ancient ruins...

 

[26Jäger]

I swear to Paradox if the next city builder isn't Cyberpunk or Post Apocalyptic my rage will consume the world.

I DIDN'T KNOW I NEEDED IT THIS MUCH UNTIL YOU POINTED OUT THAT THEY WERE POSSIBILITIES.
Why would you do this to me!?

I couldn’t agree more

 

[Darksaber501st]

Sooo....Rimworld?

I would hardly count Rimworld as city builder...
You don't have tons of colonist to care for.

That basically covers it. I've got a dozen (or two) colonists at a time in Rimworld, and so it's definitely far from a city-builder.

However, many aspects of that game are fairly appealing and I think should be given a lot of thought by whatever devs PI might use for this: You can dramtically vary the way games play out in Rimworld based on the terrain and climate you chose, which varies your available resources, hazards, building style, etc. That adds a LOT of replayability, making the game much more valuable from the consumer's point of view, and is a big part of why I've put in a lot more time (hundreds of hours versus dozens) into Rimworld than in Prison Architect, Cities:Skylines, Surviving Mars, etc. Tropico is a bit different, because while it's basically the same game-to-game I've generally played through whatever campaign they have as opposed to sandbox, because for me the mission-to-mission storyline (while not super deep) has given me a bit of direction.

Rimworld goes into super-deep detail on its colonists (how are my individual limbs doing, what is every single detail affecting my mood, what is my specific task order, etc.). Abstract that a bit, and you can ramp up the population count to a point where a "city-builder" becomes possible.

While I do like the post-apocalyptic space setting, the setting in and of itself is not a deal-breaker for me. I could do fantasy, steampunk, cyperpunk, etc. From Banished to SimCity to Anno to Aven Colony to Grand Ages:Rome to Planetbase to Casear/Pharaoh/Zeus/Emperor (I never got into Emperor, tbh, but like others here I LOVED the Impressions games) I've seen a lot of different ways to set it up. Replayability - either from some serious variations in environment, to the game being hard AF and making you try different playstyles, to modability to actual emotional interest (always the hardest but most rewarding, Rimworld gets it) - is what keeps me coming back to things.

I cannot tell you how many times I've played through Pharaoh's campaign (easily 20 or 30 times over the last decade-and-a-half) because some of those missions are HARD and LONG you get invested in your city and in the GLORY OF EGYPT.

 

[Truewhit]

Gotta put my name behind a fantasy city builder. Build inns to lure in unsuspecting D&D parties and then feed them to the coven of Vampires that lives in the castle that was built as ancient ruins...

What about fantasy/steampunk? Like Arcanum?

 

[Mr. Capiatlist]

What about fantasy/steampunk? Like Arcanum?

I certainly wouldn't turn my nose up at it, but I'm a D&D-esque fantasy fan. Pulpier and poppier than Tolkien, but not as far from the original as, for example, Final Fantasy (when it sticks to the fantasy part of that in the ones before VI and the lone standout IX).

 

[Bearjuden]

Would have liked a final "anything else you would like to tell us about what you'd like to see in a city builder?" question, but I guess I can share here, because I've always had this dream that someone would make a city builder where the rest of the world still happens in an automated fashion...so you manage a city and maybe a massive army comes along and conquers you and then moves on and now you're part of that empire, and then that empire collapses and you're independent, and maybe at one point you become a city state empire type of thing and you manage the metropole, and all this time you're only managing the city but you can see history happen to you.

But at the same time, Cyperpunk and Steampunk...I can get behind those settings. Will you release the results of the survey so we can see what the people say when it's all over?

 

[billtwo]

I have played Emperor: Rise of Middle Kingdom and Caesar III in my middle school, if PDX is going to make something like these, I will definitely buy it!

 

[king.kaiser7]

Personally i prefer a more Cold War style game (since that option wasn't on there). Would be really cool to play a sort of HoI4 style Cold War game, but its not about the wars. And more about management and espionage. But of course wars are present in the game. There were Proxy wars fought irl (like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan). It would be hard to do, but i'd imagine something along the lines of vic2 with pops in it (with their own ideological views, therefore propaganda is important).

 

[Pyoro]

Would have liked a final "anything else you would like to tell us about what you'd like to see in a city builder?" question, but I guess I can share here, because I've always had this dream that someone would make a city builder where the rest of the world still happens in an automated fashion...so you manage a city and maybe a massive army comes along and conquers you and then moves on and now you're part of that empire, and then that empire collapses and you're independent, and maybe at one point you become a city state empire type of thing and you manage the metropole, and all this time you're only managing the city but you can see history happen to you.

Sounds a little bit like Urban Empire. It's not the greatest game and doesn't go into too much details about events around you, but they still happen (and influence for example economic demands).

 

[naq29]

A non British/european steampunk city builder would be interesting where you have to build a sewage system and implant new technologies like telegraph polls in an already ancient city. It also whould be interesting where if you get too big it gets harder and harder to balance the needs of the population instead of just endless improvement. Perhaps a game that deals with a population ageing or LEAVEING so you have to deal with a brain drain. At the start you have more then enough people to work but they slowly leave for greener pastures. Population is your most valuble resource.

To be honest I want a city builder where its DIRTY. Clunky and handmade. Graffiti forms on that sculpture you built. Shanty towns full of goblins are built underneath the Dragon condos. I am bored of glass skyscrapers and concrete monoliths.

I am thinking about a dystopian city builder where you build a police state that focus on upgrading surveillance and security forces rather than improving people's lives, result in a poor, dirty world

may even be building a warhammer 40k hive planet

 

[SchwarzKatze]

I want something where you start with an old pre-built settlement and guide it to modern times.

Especially, railway should be something that you begin with, as in the case of most cities, and not something that's unlocked later.

 

[TempusxX]

I really enjoy the city builders more specifically the Anno series, my favorites are Anno 2070 and Anno 2205 and then 1800 is coming out next year

I would like to see much more city builders but a post apocalyptic city builder with the option to do wars like Anno does have

 

[Sidetrack Nick]

Because there's no place in the survey for comments.

One question not asked is if I would buy a city builder game. Answer is no. So I answered all the questions as if I were to play a city builder.

If I were to play a city-builder game again, I'd want an unlimited budget and a population that was compliant so I can make a pretty city that is perfect. If you want to show me how it compares to other cities, fine, but don't mess with my creation. There will be no slums in my city. And if there are, I'll ask for a refund. I just drove through Chicago today. It was a nightmare. I do not want anything even close to reality in my games.


Incoming rant: Games like civilization, simcity and roller coaster tycoon has taught me one thing: if you think you've designed a wonderful city/state/park, you're wrong. The world hates you. You're in debt. You're bankrupt. No one likes your magnificent roller coaster, and they won't take the perfectly set up public transportation system, nor will they live in the buildings you build even though they are many miles from the pollution and industrial zones, and your civilization well, the AI can build a bigger, better civilization faster, and if it can't either way you're screwed - by boredom of effortlessly achieving everything or by the AI blocking you from ever achieving anything.

 

[Susanna]

A place for comments would indeed have been good.

 

[The Village Idi]

I remember playing the hell out of Utopia on SNES and trying to play Outpost on PC. I want something like these done right. Loved the pick a star thing in Outpost even though it made little difference. And having to fight the alien colony in Utopia was different for a city builder.

 

[Vjeldan]

Crusader-Punks of CyberCity please!

Highly detailed Szenario with focus on atmosphere, with darker themes and decisions and some roleplaymix in the building-action. Cities skylines is enough to just build cities. What i see missing is a citiy-builder with focus on characters.